Why I Love Riding the Bus Home From Work

Junior high is brutal. Not only are you finally realizing that you have been a complete doofus since, like, first grade, why did no one tell you before?! (parents! I tell ya.), and you're trying not to be one now, and all your friends are SO cool, or maybe they aren't our friends, oh no!, how come you can't be that cool!?, I hope they like me, you find yourself eking out your day-to-day life in a school system bound and determined to skirt the edge of practical fascism as a matter of course. Re: to trust you a little as possible and enforce that distrust, shall we say, dictatorially.

I substitute taught for three years, and about half of that was in junior highs. I hated it. Not because of the students, who, I will admit got a little rowdy now and then, as you would expect of humans of that age, but because of the draconian behavior policies of the faculty and administrators. Nowhere in our society is fascism so socially acceptable as when perpetrated against junior highers. (Okay, also terrorists and prisoners, too, but let's not quibble.)

Look, I get it, you're afraid of mass chaos, kids stripping naked and fashioning spears or whatever, but maybe you should put your cross-referenced reference copy of Lord of the Flies down for a minute and actually pay attention to the real people you are dealing with. You know, treat them like people. Relationally. Because they are people. Also because junior higher are cool. No where else do you get that kind of enthusiasm about the world, that excitement about the possibilities of life, that passion for relationships and friendships. Get to high school, and while you may still have some of these a qualities, they're already beginning to be browbeaten out of you by the system, and your own bloated sense of self-awareness. Start something then, and you can go a very long way.

But Timothy, you might be saying, didn't you teach high school? Didn't you keep trying to get a high school job over a junior high/ middle school. Yes. And if I had to go back to it, I'd say the same. I have a hard enough time keeping my wayward and self-important vocabulary hospitable for peers, let alone your average-everyday 7th grader. So that's on me more than them. Also, I like high school subjects better. You can go even more in depth. But I'd do junior high if I was back in teaching if that was all that was available, sure.

Oh, and let's not even get into parents of junior highers. Is there anything worse than a parent who's spent the last twelve years of their life thinking they're raising a kid, who wakes up one morning, sees their kid's shoulders have broadened, or voice deepened, or breasts started to bud, and freaks the heck out that they're going to have an adult on their hands in half as long as this kid has been alive? Time to clamp down. Time to really dole out the what for. Darn kid, thinkin' he can grow up on me? I've got SO much to teach him, and only so much time.

And heaven forbid the kid does something remotely dangerous,.Like, running to the car, or holding hands with a real live GIRL, or heaven forbid again going on overseas mission trip! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, CHILDREN OF AAAAALLLL AGES, step right up, step right up, see the nicest, most culturally sensitive person in the world LOSE THEIR EVER-LOVIN' MIND and suddenly believe that every single possible non-American in the world is going to SLAUGHTER THEIR CHILD at the first opportunity.

So, yeah, being in junior high is the most carefully structured hell an otherwise normal society has ever devised. And not only that, these are pretty formative years, lemme tell ya. You may have had an idea of who you are, but all of a sudden come 11 or13, you realize you're a real person, and what kind of person you could possibly be. Yeah, yeah, your brain doesn't develop out of that impulsive stage until 22 or whatever, but junior high is when you start to know yourself, and while I'm not sayin' that's set in stone, that's where a lot of where it begins.

I spent my junior high years in Minsk. Which if you're not familiar with world geography, may be most familiar to you as the home of the first friend of our plagiaristic protagonist in Tom Lehrer's classic song 'Lobachevsky.' And while I can't say my outside-of-home-schools were particularly helpful, at least my parents, I thank God, were not the sort of parents who wake up one morning to realize their precious snowflake will someday soon be a snowman, instead, they fought those urges and decided to help, rather than hinder, me growing up. Starting with a this-guy-will-eventuallly-be-a-full-on-snowman-centric style of parenting from start, you might say. In Minsk, I walked to the park. I took the overnight train to Moscow to give tours to strange pastors (is there a better night's sleep than that train ride? Not for me there isn't. Not anywhere, not any bed). I took the metro home from late night youth meetings, I got involved in theatre with the international community, and oh yes, I took the bus (didn't think I'd finally get here, didja?)

Oh, the bus. I'd like to say that in grade school, for me, a to-school-walker, the bus was the magical transport to freedom from the drudgery of the humdrum daily grade school grind, but I don't have any clear memories of feeling this way. I do remember liking the camaraderie of a bus, the fun of going somewhere with these people that I knew. But it wasn't the bus, per se, but the going somewhere with that I liked. (I epitomize extrovert -- there are times that a person has left my presence, and I've completely lost my train of thought just because there was no one with me anymore.)

But I don't think the fact that I've ridden the bus home for the past two Tuesdays to get home in time to hang out with junior highers from my church and LOVED it has anything to do with that escape mindset. For me, it was the freedom of being a junior higher, with all of those typical body changes, and all of this proto-wisdom, and also, amazingly, the ability to go where I wanted, and the trust of my parents to go there. Need some fireworks? Let's go get them. Want to go shopping? Sure. Go see friends? Go ride the Super 8 roller coaster? Go where I wilt? Sure, sure, sure. As my friend Nick and I say, le's jus' go.

But really, really enjoying riding the bus home from work is obviously not exclusive to residual echoes of initial adolescent freedom. I mean, it takes me 25 minutes on a slow day to drive home, and an hour and twenty to get him by bus on a fast day. That's not freedom. So, what gives? Why did I get positively giddy juttering along on the JO Route R Olathe-Downtown Express? Why did it feel so . . . right?

I can do what I want on the bus. There are no responsibilities. I can read or write or think, or just watch the city move by, in sound-barriered air conditioning. Part of it is that I love seeing the city like that,like an outsider might see it, the way I see other cities when I'm there. I feel detached like a tourist, and so I naturally love where I am, like a tourist.

I was talking with my sister about why I like the bus so much, and she said that it's got to be something to do with how really formative growing up in a different country was. I remember feeling like I belonged where I was , living in Minsk. Yes, I didn't really speak the language. Yes, this wasn't my culture. And I was far from my own. So I created my own. While most junior high kids were getting picked on, and primping for the ladies/gents, I was developing a wild individualist streak, and enhancing and enforcing that in my own mind as much as possible. I didn't have to prove I was a different person than other people (a common source of teenage rebellion (and angst), I think), because I was clearly different than them. I was reading like mad, listening to sermons, playing video games and beating them with no contact with the outside world. I have a clarity of memories from those two years that far outshines my two years of college almost ten years later. I knew exactly who I was then. No doubts, full confidence.

Sure, I had stuff to work out, but I knew that, and was excited to get there. I didn't feel great all the time. I got angsty. I got immmature. But I knew I could work my way out of it. (It's part of that confidence, I think, that allowed me to get into a near-dating experience with a senior at a conference I attended on summer furlough the summer before my freshman year. But that's just bragging, ha-HAH!) I was drowning in beautiful certainty. Drinking it wildly.

So, it's not just the residual feeling of freedom from my junior high years. I have this odd residual feeling of belonging when I ride the bus that comes from echoes of feeling at home and completely sure of myself. It also throws me back before uncertainty came over and started hanging out all the time, poking me if I started falling asleep. Throws me back before the weight and exhaustion of high school academic responsibility. Before I had a girlfriend who became a wife who became a lover. Before debt, and before real freedom, freedom where you can step off the edge any time you like because the glass wall that you used to trust to keep you safe has been pulled away when you weren't looking. Throws me back before I had friends who were married, let alone divorced. Throws me back to when I believed in a simple system of belief, not a wild and terrifying and still somehow way more satisfying God. So, it's 5 o' th' clock and my ride is going to class until 8, so I'm off to ride the bus home again so I can cut the grass with our old school mechanical mower. Since I don't have a junior higher yet to do it for me.